Bioware Opens a Can…Of Customer Support

Hello everyone! At BioWare we’re always listening to our fans and we’ve heard our community’s comments around players with Level 50 characters being the only group awarded 30 days of play time. We appreciate the feedback and are pleased to announce that we are expanding our Legacy Promotion, also awarding 30 days of play time at no charge to players that have reached Legacy Level 6 (who may not have a 50th level character).

We just released the innovative Legacy System as part of Game Update 1.2, and felt that looking at Legacy point progression across all of your characters was a great way to reward our most avid players. This means that any of the experience you earn with any of your characters brings you closer to the goal of Legacy Level 6. The choice of how to get to Legacy Level 6 is yours.
First, you need to have passed Chapter 1 to unlock your legacy. Examples of how to get to Legacy Level 6 include:
A pair of characters Level 45 and 42
A trio of characters of Levels 45, 32 and 32
A bunch of characters Levels 35, 33, 31, 29 and 20
A single 50th level character that has enjoyed the endgame for a brief time
Remember these are just examples – you’re free to choose how to earn your Legacy experience to gain Legacy Level 6.

We’ve also got another significant piece of good news: everyone will have until April 22nd at noon CDT (5:00pm GMT – click here for a time zone converter) to have a Level 50 character or Legacy Level 6 on their account to get 30 days of game time on us. (Your 30 days of game time will be applied to your account on April 25th by 11:59pm CDT.) Players will now have multiple options, as well as more time, to try and reach these goals.

As always, we appreciate your feedback and will do our best to surprise and delight our customers.

Dr Greg Zeschuk
Studio GM, BioWare Austin

I have to give Bioware some serious props with this announcement. They made an announcement yesterday that was meant to be a good thing, but due to some horrible wording they actually pissed off a large portion of their player base. Today they’ve released this expansion on yesterday’s reward and redefined the whole thing.

And I think they’ve done a great job.

The first thing they did in redefining this reward is getting rid of those three horrible words. No longer are they rewarding players for things that are very open to interpretation and nearly immeasurable. Now they’re giving this reward to people who have achieved a specific thing within the game and taken into account the altoholic play style.

Second, they put an extension on the time limit so not only are you no longer screwed if you hadn’t already achieved the initial goal of level 50, now you’ve got another 9 days to plan and work towards achieving it. Legacy 6 isn’t too terrible to achieve, and that 9 day extension gives you time to push for it if you haven’t already achieved it. This completely changes the foundation of the reward because it’s no longer set in stone that you’ve either already done this by now or you’re screwed, and that’s a huge deal if you ask me. It’s also important to note that those 9 days includes two full weekends for extra playtime.

Third, it should not be understated how awesome it is that Bioware heard the outcry and within a day had redefined it. It might not please every customer out there that it wasn’t given to an even larger group of people, but you do have to draw some line with a reward like this because it literally is a loss of money on their part. They aren’t just giving away something virtual this time, they’re basically handing out cash as a thank you.

8 responses to “Bioware Opens a Can…Of Customer Support”

It is the first time I have heard of a MMO company giving out 30 days free without some sort of major major screwup. SoE did it for Everquest 2 but that was because they got hacked and their game was offline for 2 weeks heh.

I’m sure that didn’t slow down the thought process at all, but there’s still the fact that end game content has been pretty crappy and Bioware is fully aware of their subscription count and how those two relate. I’m sure the beta invites contributed, but I wouldn’t say it was the sole or even primary reasoning behind it.

So more a case of either BW’s inexperience meaning the game was released before there was enough content for level cap (something MoP is supposed to be addressing for WoW).

I think MMO developers tend to underestimate how quickly part of the player base will consume content, previously this was dealt with by introducing timesinks enroute to level cap (slow movement, rep grinds to unlock content etc.)